Date Selector of the Damned

"It's no secret that web developers are generally considered the red headed stepchildren of programming, and with good reason," writes Joe. "With its proliferation of forgiving and loosely structured languages and the huge demand for web developers in our modern web-centric world, it's not surprising that the field is practically overrun by script monkeys with no real programming background. Armed with a shelf full of books on all the latest web technologies and a subscription to Experts' Exchange, they enthusiastically pound away at their keyboards day after day, happily and cluelessly producing oceans of spaghetti code so bad that even Olive Garden wouldn't serve it."

"Over the course of a decade in web development, I've seen so much terrible code that it takes something truly unholy to elicit more from me than a deep sigh and a weary eye-rubbing... but, every once in a great while, the devil still opens hell's source repository and looses upon my screen a horror so foul that even one as jaded as myself weeps in bitter despair. This is one such horror. I apologetically present to you: the date selector of the damned.

Joe continues, "the premise is so simple it could be from Chapter 1 of a Javascript book: a date field that pops-up a calendar to easily select a month, day and year. It's a single line of jQuery or, if this were done in the days of old, an integration of a third-party component. In either case, any web developer with a week of experience under his belt should be able to implement such a requirement with a couple dozen lines of code in half an hour.

"Unfortunately, my predecessor had far more than a week of experience -- not just with Javascript, but with jQuery as well -- when he wrote his utterly incomprehensible implementation of this simple javascript task."

Joe adds, "it should be mentioned that my predecessor was a poster child of diligence when it came to staying on top of modern industry trends: jQuery, ASP.Net MVC framework, ajax, you name it. He was the very model of an enlightened modern-day senior web developer, and the plethora of problems that had plagued the company's web apps in the two years he had worked there were entirely the fault of his clueless and idiotic junior... at least according to him. Let his tale be a cautionary one, that a man must first learn the alphabet before he aspires to be Shakespeare.